What a pointless movie this is. One of the most obnoxious things about liberal filmmaking is the tendency to make advocacy films that preach to the choir. What I object to in these sorts of movies is that the playing field is not fair. They pretend to be objective but are really highly biased. When I watch propaganda, I like them to rely solely on manipulative emotional imagery instead of pseudo-facts (a la Sergei Eisenstien). Even when agree with the message and find the movie interesting (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price) there seems to be something disingenuous and patronizing.
Death of a President is the worst kind of advocacy film- one that masks its intent until the end. It is also especially annoying because it is NOT boring- I was moderately interested in the movie the whole way through, and when I got to the garbage at the end, wanted 93 minuets of my life back.
I will have to give director Gabriel Range credit- he and his editors must have sat through hours and hours boring speeches and news coverage to cobble this movie together. Range splices togehter found footage of George W. Bush and Dick Chaney speeches with new interviews with fictional characters (occasionally special effects are poorly used, pasting Bush's face over and actor's body). As you can gather from the title, the movie is a "what if" story involving the assassination of Bush in October of 2007. Despite the fact he is (will be?) even more unpopular at that time as then he is now, the President decides to give a policy speech in Chicago, a liberal city that is filled with thousands of protestors, some of whom turn violent. The speech goes off without incident, but Bush is killed during a meet-and-greet session by a sniper.
Up until this point the movie was pretty interesting (although the technique was obvious) and I was wondering what going to happen next. You should stop reading now if you don't want to know. The FBI arrests a Syrian immigrant named Jamal Abu Zikri (Malik Bader). Let's think about that for a moment. I have nothing against Arabs or Muslims, but if I was an FBI agent investigating this crime, what group do you think I would look at first? Just because someone is Arab or Muslim doesn't mean that they are guilty, of course, but common sense would suggest that members of these groups around the crime scene might be the first on the list to look into. Somehow, I thought that there was a 100% chance that Jamal Abu Zikri was not guilty- and I was right. When you find out who is guilty, the answer is so manipulative that it is an insult to be people on both sides of the Iraq issue.
If Range wanted to make a movie about racism towards Arabs or prejudice towards Muslims in America, why didn't he make a movie about factual events! There were plenty of disgusting stories of "retribution" towards those groups after 9/11- why not make a movie about those? And there's also something disconcerting about a Brit making this movie- isn't' Range's leader, Tony Blair, Bush's poodle and doing much of the same things at home? The United Kingdom is certainly not immune from racism against foreigners, what gives him the right to come over here and complain about us in this manner? This movie sucked.
Death of a President (2006)